Sent Is Not the Same as Restless

The fourth one was the repair shed.

Before that it was the Saturday tutoring in the church hall, which ran nine weeks. Before that a men's breakfast, which ran five. Before that a prayer chain on his phone that he built himself, with a rota, color coded, and it lasted until the second week of March.

The repair shed was going to be different. He had thought it through properly this time. People bring the broken lamp, the kettle, the chair with the leg off, and he mends it for nothing and they sit and have a cup of tea while he does it, and by about week three somebody says something real, because people always say something real when the other man is looking at his hands and not at them.

He put the notice up. He bought a soldering iron and a set of clamps that cost more than he told his wife they cost. He cleared the back of the garage.

Four people came the first week. Two the second. One the fourth, and that one was his neighbor being kind.

He is sitting out there now with the light on, at half nine at night, in the smell of solder and old dust, looking at a table with nothing on it.

And the thought that has arrived is not the one about the shed. It is the older one, the one that has been circling him since he was nineteen, and tonight it has finally landed and said its whole sentence out loud.

You have started nine things in fifteen years, and not one single time has anybody sent you. You just cannot sit still. That is all this has ever been.

The word only ever meant one thing

There is a Greek word that has been turned into a title, and it has been printed on business cards and put in front of people's names, and the argument about all that has been going for a long time and it can go on without us tonight.

Because underneath the argument the word means one thing, and it has always meant one thing, and it is a plain word that a shipping clerk would have used. It means sent. A sent one. Somebody who is somewhere because somebody else dispatched him there.

That is it. That is the entire word.

And here is where Jesus puts it, in a locked room, on the evening of the resurrection, with the doors bolted because everybody in there was frightened:

Just as the Father has sent me, so I also send you.John 20:21

Look who is in the room. Not a board. Not a tier. A group of ordinary men who had all run away eight days earlier and were currently sitting behind a barred door. He breathed on them and He sent them, and He never once handed round a rank.

So put the title down. You do not need it, you were never asked to take it, and a man who appoints himself to something has by that very act proved he was not sent, because sending is a thing that is done to you.

And you are already sent by the One who does the sending. The word puts it in the past tense in a locked room to frightened men who had run away, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a fact about you rather than a nice sentence about them.

Now the question underneath, which is the real one, and I am not going to give you a flattering answer to it.

How does a man tell the difference between being sent and being restless?

Not by how strongly he feels it. Restlessness feels enormous. That is its main characteristic. It arrives at eleven at night with a whole plan attached and it is the most alive a man feels all week, and by Thursday it has gone flat and he cannot explain to anybody, including himself, where it went.

Three things tell you, and none of them is a feeling.

And you are not being asked to trust the feeling. The word says the Lord directeth the steps of a man rather than his enthusiasm for them, and the Spirit is the one who gives a man the nerve to test a fire instead of obeying it at eleven at night.

The first is that a sending comes from outside you. Somebody hands it to you. That is what the word means. It might be a passage that will not leave you alone for two years. It might be a person put in front of you so often that it stops being coincidence. It might be your own pastor asking you to do a small dull thing. But it comes from outside. Restlessness never does. Restlessness is generated on the premises.

The second is that a sending survives being boring. This is the hard one and it is the one that settles most cases. Restlessness cannot survive week four, because restlessness was never about the work, it was about the relief that starting gives a man who cannot sit still. A sending will do week four, and week forty, and it will do it with one person in the room and the neighbor being kind, because the sender is the point and not the turnout.

The third is that a sending can be handed to somebody else without dying. If the thought of another man running it well is unbearable to you, that is worth knowing, and it is not a condemnation, it is just information, and it is better to have it now than in six years.

Now hear the second half, because I am not leaving you sitting in a cold shed with a diagnosis.

Nine things in fifteen years is not nine failures. That is a man with a fire in him and nowhere authorized to put it. And the ache you have carried since you were nineteen, the one that says nobody has ever sent you, is not a character flaw. It is a real ache, and it is one of the loneliest there is, and it usually belongs to people who would have gone if anybody had asked.

And nine starts did not disqualify you from a tenth. The word says His mercies are new every morning and great is His faithfulness, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that a garage with nothing on the table is not a verdict on the man sitting in it.

So here is what is actually true tonight. You have been waiting fifteen years for a commissioning service, and the sending has already happened. He breathed on frightened men in a locked room and said, as the Father sent me, so I send you. You have been sent by the One who sends. Not to a title. Not to a platform. To a road, and probably to a shorter one than the plan in your head.

And do not go around your own leaders to prove it. The man who is truly sent has never once needed to overthrow anybody to start walking. Tell them what you are doing. Ask what they actually need. A sent man is easy to send.

And you have nothing to prove to the people over you. The word says obey them that have the rule over you and submit yourselves, and it puts that instruction to people who were genuinely gifted, and the Spirit is the one who makes submission a strength rather than a shrinking.